Acoustic analyses of upper airway and phonatory stability were conducted on samples of sustained phonation to evaluate the relation between laryngeal and articulomotor stability for 31 patients with dysarthria and 12 non-dysarthric control subjects. Significantly higher values were found for the variability in fundamental frequency and formant frequency of patients who have Huntington’s disease compared with normal subjects and patients with Parkinson’s disease. No significant correlations were found between formant frequency variability and the variability of the fundamental frequency for any subject group. These findings are discussed as they pertain to the relationship between phonatory and upper airway subsystems and the evaluation of vocal tract motor control impairments in dysarthria.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a research fellowship from the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” for Petra Zwimer and the United States Veterans Administration. The authors wish to thank Thomas Murry for his assistance in data collection and Ana Siblesz for her valuable help in evaluating patients' speech profiles.

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